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You are contradicting yourself. If the latter is true, the "out-of-this-world" hardware of Samsung and the likes, combined with the "every bit as capable as iOS" OS called Android should make Apple, RIM, Nokia and every other cellphone manufacturer "fall apart".

You need to re-read what I said. I don't think anyone would consider a lower profit margin for Apple "falling apart". Apple could do fine with a lower profit margin as long as the market continues to grow at a high rate.

I'm saying that Android (since it is free and popular) is a baseline for smartphone OS capabilities, and the recent versions of that OS set the bar pretty high. Companies can make a better/more compelling operating system for phones, but I'm sceptical that we're going to see a major improvement like iOS was to its predecessors for a very long time.

Can Windows Phone or iOS best Android in one area or another? Sure. But I don't think that will provide a significant enough lead that non-Android phones will be able to command a large premium for their products. In other words, it will be like the PC market has been for the last couple of decades.

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Originally Posted by Arthur Dent

the "out-of-this-world" hardware of Samsung

And I didn't say that Samsung's hardware is "out-of-this-world", where are you quoting from? I'm just saying that it's competitive with all the other manufacturers best devices.

Sorry Hugh, but that is seriously one of the silliest statements you have posted yet. Yes, obviously you want a company to be profitable, but it also has to be planning for the future as well. Both Nokia and RIM were quite profitable just over a year ago, and now they are both on the verge of collapse. Obviously profits are not the only things that matter here.

As TC has mentioned, Google and Apple have drastically different business models, with different end goals in mind. Since Google doesn't make money from actual activations, they are attempting to tie people to the Google ecosystem for future earnings, both from the Play Store and AdSense. Activations are virtually all that matter to Google at present.

Can Windows Phone or iOS best Android in one area or another? Sure. But I don't think that will provide a significant enough lead that non-Android phones will be able to command a large premium for their products. In other words, it will be like the PC market has been for the last couple of decades.

Maybe. But I think it will be the same just as far as Apple is concerned - owning small but secure and profitable share. The rest of the phone (I'm not going to use "smartphone" because all phones will soon be "smart") market will not be resembling the current Windows domination and the PC hardware universe where it has been implemented. Android as OS seems to be a candidate for the cellular equivalent of "Windows for PC" right now, but there's no way it can get the 90% or more of Windows OS on PC. It all depends on the other long term player- Windows 8 - or more precisely how many customers and cellular OEMs will adopt it. Not so much on what Apple will come up with. I find it highly probable that even Windows 8 will surpass iOS's share, but that still won't affect Apple's healthy margins.

And, yeah, yeah, I wasn't quoting you on the Samsung hardware thing. Just echoing the joy I see in every Samsung phone thread .

The amount of people (and ease) that are crossing over must be of a concern to both camps. But I think Apple has a better lock-in than Android. This is not like it was before where convincing someone to switch from a PC to a MAC (or vice versa) took a lot of time and effort. It could happen over the life of the product. Which is what 2 -3 years typically?

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Conclusion: Apple has a market cap that is three times Google. It has profits that are more than double Google.

Not so different from the early PC days either. Then it was a highly profitable Apple vs Atari, Commodore and IBM's PC division. By the mid-1990s Apple was almost bankrupt and Windows PCs were dominant.

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Apple is making way more money from smartphones and tablets than Google and that is all that counts.

I agree that it's important to be profitable but market share counts in overall strategy. Many companies operate at a loss initially to gain market share. The successful ones learn how to turn market share into profit while maintaining both. Lose either and the company can fail.

Remember when IBM dominated the computer market, the DEC, then Microsoft. MS is in decline, just like IBM and DEC due to failure to adapt to market changes. Remember when Nokia and Motorola dominated the cell phone market? They've been pushed out by smart phone innovators such as Apple. Remember when RIM dominated the smart phone market? Will Android push out Apple? Despite how it looks presently, it can happen. The list of big tech players that were worth $billions and are now gone is a long one. The only thing that can be said for certain is that nobody can predict, for certain, the next major player.

__________________At 20 I had a good mind. At 40 I had money. At 60 I've lost my mind and my money. Oh, to be 20 again. --Scary

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